In advance of his congressional testimony, Trump’s personal lawyer wants the world to know that his loyalty to the president is deep and unwavering, and then some. “I’d never walk away,” he says.

“The part that’s most disappointing is that I haven’t spoken to the president in several weeks. I haven’t spoken to Melania or any of the kids,” Michael Cohen,Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and confidante, lamented to me last week. It was a Friday morning and Cohen was biting into eggs over easy and dry seven-grain toast at a coffee shop in Water Mill, the hamlet of Southampton, which was sandwiched between a Tracy Anderson studio and a farmers’ market, and near his vacation home. It was the unofficial last weekend of summer, and while the diners around us discussed their upcoming boat trips or blueprints for new houses, Cohen was facing a more pressing, and public, summons. As one of several figures under scrutiny in an F.B.I. and congressional investigation into purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cohen was preparing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.

The testimony, originally scheduled for the Tuesday after Labor Day, had been delayed by the time we met, leaving him to spin his wheels as his name appeared in stories and across cable-news chyrons. His profile had recently been amplified by a Washington Post report noting that he had reached out to the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential race seeking help for a potential Trump real-estate project in Russia. And Cohen was already a co-star of the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia, prepared as opposition research by a former British Intelligence agent. In the unverified report, he’s said to be a crucial conduit to the Russians. “It’s like a Michael Crichton novel,” Cohen told me.

In advance of the hearing, Cohen said that at the advice of his lawyer, he and the Trumps were now on a forced break from speaking to one another. “All parties thought it would be best if we ceased communication unless it was an emergency so that when the questioning occurs, nobody can say to me, ‘Well, did you speak to the president within the last week or three weeks? What did you talk about?’” He continued: “It’s good legal advice,” he said. “But it’s not the advice I want. . . . That’s something that’s difficult for me because I routinely spoke to all of them on a regular basis.”

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Cohen has been described as the sixth Trump child, or as the Tom Hagen in this twisted version of The Godfather, and sometimes as both, even by Cohen himself. It is, in many ways, a fair description. Like Trump, Cohen has a porous filter, a perennially puffed-up chest, and a penchant for histrionics, particularly when things are not going his way. He also grew up on the outskirts of New York City looking in, doesn't sleep more than three hours per night, he said, and appears to subscribe to the notion that all press is good press. When I asked Cohen how he handles being the object of social-media ire, he responded, without a breath, “It means I’m relevant.”

Perhaps most pointedly, the two men prioritize loyalty. After a decade as a counsel for the Trump Organization, where he rose to executive vice president, Cohen resigned in January in order to serve as Trump’s personal lawyer, thereby avoiding the appearance of a conflict that would come with cashing a Trump Organization check while working for the president. But as Cohen put it to me, the distance was now grating on him. He would much prefer to be in Washington with his former boss, especially as the president faced the roughest stretch of his tenure amid the Russia investigation, a pair of historically catastrophic hurricanes, and forthcoming debates over the debt-ceiling, tax reform, and health-care. “At times I wish I were there in D.C. more, sitting with him in the Oval Office, like we used to at Trump Tower, to protect him,” he said. “I feel guilty that he’s in there right now almost alone, especially now that Keith has resigned,” he said. (Cohen was referring to Trump’s longtime bodyguard and confidante, Keith Schiller, who is reportedly leaving the White House.) “There are guys who are very loyal to him that would have gone in, but there was a concerted effort by high-ranking individuals to keep out loyalists.”

The word “loyal” came up more than a dozen times in the course of our conversations. During a telephone discussion a few days earlier, Cohen joked that maybe if he saw the president in a white sheet at a Klan rally, then he would think twice about lending his support. (After making the comment, Cohen, who is Jewish and the child of a Holocaust survivor, clarified that he was speaking in jest, and that neither he nor the president condone white supremacy.) His loyalty is so unceasing, he said, that it tortures him to even walk by Trump Tower, and it infuriates him that he believes there are still people in the White House who are more interested in building their own brands than in being loyal to the president or serving the American people.

Even though Cohen is not currently talking to Trump, he kept two phones—one in a white extended battery case, the other in a black model—on the table throughout our meeting. One is a personal phone, and the other, he said, is just for the White House. “It has the contact info for everybody in D.C. My voicemail fills up quite frequently. I want to make sure that people can get through to me,” he explained. I asked if it was the white phone. “It’s actually the black one. I just figured people would think it’s the white one if they were going to try to grab it off the table.” That phone’s backdrop, though, is a photo of the White House.

It may not matter that Trump and Cohen are currently on their communication hiatus. Psychically, they occupy the same bunker. At one point, Cohen seemed to succinctly explain their relationship, as he saw it. “One man who wants to do so much good with so many detractors against him needs support,” he said. As he spoke, he appeared to tear up.

Cohen agreed to meet me in the midst of his own media maelstrom of Trumpian proportions. Earlier that week, he had submitted records to Congress ahead of his hearing, including e-mails. Part of the dump, according to both The Washington Post and The New York Times, included an e-mail exchange between him and Felix Sater, a real-estate broker with ties to the Kremlin who worked with the Trump Organization, in 2015, in which the two discussed the possibility of a Trump Tower project in Moscow. Sater, the e-mails showed, suggested that the plans could be built with the help of the Russian government, and that it could aid in Trump’s election bid.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote as part of the exchange, according to the reports. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” (The project was dropped before the Republican primaries, and there is no evidence that Sater, who Cohen described as a “salesman,” delivered on any of his promises.)

Cohen waved the controversy away. He told me he was just doing his job when he received the proposal and that this was just “business as usual and nothing more . . . just another project, another licensing deal.” Still, he said he was keen on making it happen. “I really wanted to see this building go up, because the economics were fantastic.” As he talked it over with Sater, Cohen said that Dmitry Peskov,Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, came up in their conversation. “I said, let me e-mail him and I’m going to see whether or not this is legitimate, that they’re aware of it with the land acquisition.” Neither of them had his e-mail address, he said. “I typed in ‘Kremlin’ into Google and there’s a phone number that’s there and underneath it, there’s an e-mail address for info@kremlin.ru or whatever it is. I’ll show you right now.”

The service in Water Mill is terrible, so it took a few minutes for Cohen to pull it up, but he eventually showed me a site displaying both a phone number and that general e-mail address. “It’s comedy,” he said.

Cohen sent Peskov a note through that general e-mail inbox, which Peskov confirmed he received but did not respond to. “There is nothing, no contact between me and any Russian officials except sending one e-mail to a general inbox and it went unresponded,” he said. “I was a little disappointed that it went unresponded,” he smiled.

His expression turned serious, however, as he circled back to his purported innocence, something he did repeatedly. “I can tell you for certainty that neither I nor the president were involved, at any point in time, with this Russian conspiracy,” he said. “I’ve never been paid by or colluded with any Russian to hack the D.N.C., to create search-engine optimization tools to cause Trump’s positives up and Hillary’s negatives up, I’ve never been to Prague”—as alleged by the unverified dossier—“I’ve never been to the Czech Republic. This whole thing has been an attack on me for doing my job. That’s all that I did. I did my job.”

Cohen echoed this sentiment in an eight-page letter that his lawyer sent to the House Intelligence Committee. “Mr. Cohen is not aware of any impropriety related to Mr. Trump’s ‘relationship’ with Russia, nor is he aware of Mr. Trump having an improper political relationship with officials of the Russian Federation,” the letter said. It also provided a detailed rebuttal of the dossier, which alleged that Cohen was a central figure in the effort to influence the 2016 election. His name is peppered throughout the 35-page document, which claims, among other far more salacious, unsubstantiated details, that Cohen traveled to Prague last summer to meet with a Russian official.

“The actuality is that I was in California at U.S.C. with my son meeting the baseball coach and taking a tour,” he said. “Then you have these snarky idiots who said ‘Well, maybe it was the next day.’ Well, actually, no, because I was with Harvey Levin,” he explained, the man behind the gossip empire TMZ, who he said is an old friend. They went to TMZ studios to watch them produce some show, he said. (Levin did not respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen said he was anxious to repeat this to Congress, whenever the hearing is scheduled, so that he could get on with his life. He wants to get back on cable TV to defend the president, as he did throughout the campaign. His lawyers have advised him to take a break to prepare for the hearing, but Cohen said he was already prepared the day he was subpoenaed. Because “how do you prepare for something you never did?”

He initially wanted the hearing to be public, he said, though his lawyers and friends advised him against it. One reason for their concern may be that he runs hot, and he knows it. In 2015, Cohen threatened a reporter from The Daily Beast who was writing a story about reports that Ivana Trump had accused Trump of rape in a deposition as part of their divorce. (Ivana Trump has recanted the statement.) “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly,” Cohen said,according to The Daily Beast. “Because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.”

Cohen told me that while he made some statements that were inarticulate, he would do no differently today in order to protect Trump and “the children.” If Congress respects him, he said, he will give them the same respect back, though he said he will have no patience for “stupidity.” And if they don’t show him that respect? “The transcript is going to be very interesting to read.”

Cohen first met Trump through his son, Donald Jr., back in 2006. At the time, he was an attorney at a law firm, and he had a number of businesses on the side—at one point or another working in the taxi medallion business and the Ukrainian ethanol business with his brother, whose Ukrainian father-in-law had an agribusiness company. It was when he became treasurer of the board for Trump World Tower, where he and his family owned apartments, that Cohen said he caught their eye.

After consulting with the president on a few legal matters, he said Trump brought him into his office and, to his shock, offered him a job. “He said, ‘I’d love it.’ I’d work right for him, that I’d be perfect. I said, ‘Well, how much are you paying?’ He writes a number on a piece of paper. I said, ‘No. It just wasn’t going to work.’ That’s when the negotiation then started. Everything with Trump is a negotiation.”

They reached a deal, and Cohen became executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Trump, setting up shop in Ivanka Trump’s old office, making him one of the highest-ranking employees without a shared last name. “During the campaign, towards the end, I was offered $10 million to write a tell-all book,” he told me. “I said, ‘How about $100 million.’ They asked if I’d do it for that much and I told them no, I just wanted to see how high I could get them up and then say no. There’s no money in the world that could get me to disclose anything about them.”

That wasn’t long after Steve Bannon joined the campaign, and, on his second day, according to Cohen, accused him of leaking to a reporter. “I’m thankful I sat on my hands that day,” he said. “I’m the guy who stops the leaks. I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president . . . and I told him that before he comes here with his anger and his conjectures, I strongly recommended he think twice before doing it again.” (Bannon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen said he didn’t, and that he likes Bannon and still thinks he is loyal to the president, which he can’t say for some others who remain in the White House. (He would not name names.) He is glad that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, are still there, though he said he warned them not to go down to Washington. “They’re under attack also . . . and I told them it would be ugly for them and I recommended that they not go in. I remember both of them telling me that ‘dad needs our help,’” he said. “Unfortunately, my prediction was correct. . . . There’s things that came out about Jared and his real estate and the finances. This is a family that tries to stay under the radar in terms of their business and I’m sure Charlie [Kushner] is not happy right now at all."

That is not to say that Cohen blindly supports the president. He said that he wishes the president would occasionally stop tweeting. He can’t understand why Trump gave his infamous press conference about the violent protest in Charlottesville, at which the president equated neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” with those gathered to protest them. And he said that he would have changed the way the administration rolled out its Muslim ban executive order. “Do I agree with everything he says? No,” he said. “The same way that you’d protect a sibling is the same way that I’d protect the children. The same way that I’d protect your parents is the same way that I’d protect the president and Melania.”

Cohen’s actual family has suffered because of his support of the Trump family. He said some students at his daughter’s college and his son’s school in New York City say things about him that “decorum would say they probably shouldn’t have.” His mother checks in every day to see how he is doing. He says that he routinely receives death threats on social media for associating with Trump. Sometimes people on the street will say “really nasty, negative stuff,” which he sometimes responds to by asking them to step two or three feet closer and “see what happens. I tell them to come say it right to my face, not from across the street. Come shake my hand.”

The way his family has been treated weighs on him. “It was my decision to go and work for Trump,” he said. “Not my brother’s. Not his wife’s. Not my nephews’—13 and 11. They’re like me, casualties of war that nobody cares about as long as they can defame and damage president Trump and the Republican Party.”

Of course, Cohen can walk away at any point. “I’d never walk away,” he responded, over and over, when I raised the point. Even at the expense of his family? “I’d never walk away.” When I point out that it’s a tremendous amount of loyalty for the president, he tells me that the president deserves it.

It has been observed time and again that President Trump’s aides appear on television or speak to the press in order to address an audience of one—the man in the Oval Office. Kellyanne Conway urged Fox News viewers to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing brand after Nordstrom dropped it from its stores earlier this year; Stephen Miller told the Sunday shows that “the president’s powers will not be questioned”; both Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci praised Trump from the briefing room lectern, boasting about the crowd sizes he attracts and his athletic prowess.

Cohen knows Trump better than just about anybody. Surely, he is also aware that obsequious expressions of deep loyalty to the president, like saying that he’d take a bullet for him, at a time when they’re not otherwise communicating, plays well to that audience. Meanwhile, Cohen insists he is not worried about consequences to himself, apart from the damage being done to his family and the legal bills that are already climbing into the seven-figures. (He says insurance will cover it). He told me that he thinks that the president will be loyal to him, should he need him to be, though he said he would never call on him for that. The president, after all, has the ultimate Trump card—the ability to pardon—and he has already reportedly been asking those around him about these powers.

Cohen wouldn’t speculate about whether or not he thinks the president would pardon those in the crosshairs of the Russia investigation. Does he think President Trump would pardon him? “I know that I will never have to ask him to do that.”

Trump vs. Political Correctness

“The part that’s most disappointing is that I haven’t spoken to the president in several weeks. I haven’t spoken to Melania or any of the kids,” Michael Cohen,Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and confidante, lamented to me last week. It was a Friday morning and Cohen was biting into eggs over easy and dry seven-grain toast at a coffee shop in Water Mill, the hamlet of Southampton, which was sandwiched between a Tracy Anderson studio and a farmers’ market, and near his vacation home. It was the unofficial last weekend of summer, and while the diners around us discussed their upcoming boat trips or blueprints for new houses, Cohen was facing a more pressing, and public, summons. As one of several figures under scrutiny in an F.B.I. and congressional investigation into purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cohen was preparing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.